NASA Robotics Expert to Speak at RIT Jan. 22

Terry Fong will discuss NASA’s plans to use robots for moon exploration

NASA believes it can utilize robots to uncover new secrets about the moon when manned missions resume in approximately 2025.

Terry Fong, the director of the Intelligent Robotics Group at NASA’s Ames Research Center, will discuss how his group has been developing and testing planetary robots for human exploration in a talk at Rochester Institute of Technology’s B. Thomas Golisano College of Computing and Information Sciences. Fong’s talk begins at 1 p.m. Friday in the Golisano College auditorium and is open to the public, although seating is limited.

“Robots can do a variety of work that cannot, or should not, be performed by human explorers,” Fong says. “I will discuss how these robots differ from previous space robots, present results and lessons learned from field testing, and discuss directions for future research.”

Fong has published more than 70 papers in field robotics, human-robot interaction, virtual reality user interfaces, and parallel processing. His talk is being hosted by the Golisano College’s honors program.